Computing concepts and/or principals such as cloud computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and/or IT (information technology) service management based on frameworks such as the IT infrastructure library enable the design and the creation of large (heterogeneous) information systems and/or complex networked application landscapes. Due to innovations, mergers, and/or acquisitions, (IT) application landscapes are becoming increasingly complex. Application landscapes may comprise one or more software applications, enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), legacy systems, data warehouses, middleware for exchanging data, and/or connecting software applications, etc.
IT failure may be a high risk for a business far ahead of other factors such as financial risk and/or regulatory constraint. Complexity may be driven by cross-application usage, changing business requirements, and/or unknown dependencies between process, application, and/or infrastructure layers. Therefore controllability and maintainability may be important aspects for a good performance of said complex application landscapes.
Application landscapes however lack sufficient transparency and control in order for them to be kept alive. Furthermore, most application landscapes merely incorporate incomplete overviews of business scenarios, business scenarios with negligible use, and/or business scenarios which are not in use at all, but which are still in an application landscape. Therefore, control, development, and/or maintenance of application landscapes may be not supported.
Some concepts to control process activity for having power over single processes have been provided (see e.g. O. Daute, S. Conrad “Activity Control in Application Landscapes” LNICST 34, pp. 83-92, Springer, 2009). However, suitable mechanisms to run and to control application landscapes have been neglected. In particular, management control instances are not considered for application landscapes. For example, business scenarios can trigger process activities across a whole application landscape, use different applications, and/or exchange data. However, no outer control mechanisms on top of application landscapes are available. As a result controllability, maintainability and/or an ability to evolve application landscapes decrease constantly. Consequently, flexibility and/or an ability to change and/or modify (software and/or hardware) components of an application landscape are reduced. Furthermore, costs and maintenance time are increased.
Hence, there is a need for an improvement of controllability and maintenance of application landscapes including updates, landscape recovery, and/or landscape management tasks. Furthermore, improved mechanisms supporting landscape administrators to react more purposefully in case of faults and/or to avoid cost-intensive incidents are required.